The Grey Zone
2002RCC

prime

Based on the real-life events and featuring a first-rate ensemble cast, this compelling and harrowing film chronicles a unit of Auschwitz's Sonderkommando, a special squad of Jewish prisoners who staged the only armed revolt that would ever take place at Auschwitz.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

THE GREY ZONE is the finest film yet made about the horrors of the Nazi Final Solution for the extermination of the Jews and other undesirables in the concentration/death camps such as Auschwitz and Birkenau. While other movies about the Holocaust may be more accessible to the public at large and thus more apt to win Oscars, THE GREY ZONE is based upon hard facts and tells those facts in the most visually compelling and emotionally devasting manner imaginable. Tim Blake Nelson directed and penned the screenplay based on his own play of the same name which in turn was based on the writings of camp survivor Dr Miklos Nyiszlis. The title is descriptive on many levels: the constant darkness of the atmosphere around Auschwitz from the smoke and ash debris of the crematoriums, the different zones with the camp that designated the various levels of waiting for annhilation, and that zone (grey) between life (white) and death (black) that allowed some of the Jews to elect to be Sonderkommandos - workers who lead their own people to the showers, reassuringly taking their clothes, locking them in the gas chambers, then unloading the bodies onto carts to transport to the crematoriums where they actually had to place the corpses into the ovens and cart away the ashes after the burnings. As the 'desparation of doing anything for survival' makes the indvidual do the incomprehensible, so does this film explore how crushed were the minds of these fated men and women.Nelson achieves a harrowing sense of reality by uncompromisingly showing all phases of life and death in the camps and he does this so successfully in his choice of terse taut dialogue, quiet voices, lingering images of eyes, and a pacing that seems as formidable as the facts at hand.Read more ›

I am shocked by the negative reviews of this movie. Anyone who thinks "Schindler's List" was a good movie about the Shoah doesn't know anything about the Holocaust. The problem with "Schindler," "Life is Beautiful," and that PBS film from the seventies is that those films all ignore the tensions & conflicts between the inmates themselves. "Treblinka" by Steiner, "This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen" by Borowski, "Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land" by Nomberg-Przuytyk, "The Drowned & the Saved" by Levi--and dozens of others--all talk about the plight of the prisoners who became "muslims," and the brutality of the inmates who ran the different housing blocks. A prisoner became a "muslim" once that person became ill, discouraged, starving--and gave up hope. The "muslims" were so named because they would rock back & forth when sitting--similar to Muslims when they prayed (accord to Borowski). Inmates were responsible for the day to day operation of the camps, and there was a clear hierarchy; a strong social structure. In her book, Ms. Nomberg-Przuytyk explains that while it was terrible to get hit by the SS guards, it was much more shocking and demoralizing to be beaten by other inmates. Finally, Primo Levi makes it clear in all his books that the inmates who did the work they were assigned, did not try to shirk or hide from their tasks, ate their regular food rations and did not steal (or "organize") additional food--those people were all dead in six months. Inside the camps, if a prisoner was going to survive, survival had to come at the expense of other inmates. End of story.Read more ›

I knew that "The Grey Zone" was about a sonder-kommando unit at a Nazi concentration camp, which in and of itself would be an intensely dramatic situation. The sonder-dommandos where the Jews at death camps, such as Auschwitz II-Birkenau, who escorted their fellow Jews to die in the gas chambers, then took the bodies to the crematoriums, and disposed of the ashes. For four months the sonder-kommandos carried out their duties, and enjoyed (for lack of a better word), extra food, cigarettes, and even clean sheets. "The Grey Zone" is set in October of 1944, which meant that the end of the war was in site as Allied troops were moving on Germany (this is before the Hitler's last great counter offensive, the Battle of the Bulge), so four months could well mean being alive. Of course, this is if the Nazis do not decide to kill everybody in the camp before it is liberated.Actually, there are a lot of "ifs" behind this 2001 film, directed by Tim Blake Nelson and adapted from his stage play. If you have a chance to live in a death camp, do you take advantage of that opportunity even if it means collaborating witn the Nazis who are gassing your people? In many other cinematic tales of the Holocaust there is the recurring idea that the sonder-kommando were worst that the Nazis, because they betrayed their own people, and the biggest "if" of all in this film remains what would YOU do if you were in this situation? You can say, "No, I would never do that," but then how many stories about the differences between behavioral intentions and overt behavior do you want me to tell you?Read more ›